


Hayalet

by TheIonWhalesArise (ToastedRoach)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, M/M, Psychological Drama, Sci-Fi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 09:36:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14931758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToastedRoach/pseuds/TheIonWhalesArise
Summary: A year on Earth is but a blink of an eye in the isolated module Cleo shares with her research objects. Carnac floats free in a large container pulled behind Hayalet on the ships journey to the endless void. Cleo is aware of the sacrifice she's making. She won't survive this trip. Hayalet's crew only has two other humans and they too know they will never see their destination with their own eyes. All they have are approximates, projections, telescope images. They will be long deceased when Hayalet arrives to the orbit of what scientists on Earth and Mars named Asa. Sanctuary. Home. New Earth.Sage is the only AI in mankind's history to develop self-awareness. He's the very soul of Hayalet, guiding the ship through the unstable currents of space in search of a new home for humanity. Sage is accompanied by an android crew and three human scientists: Cleo in her isolated lab, the sadistic chief engineer Cole, and his young apprentice Billy. Since their journey began Sage has become obsessed with Billy and making the young man his property. The only obstacle though is strong, essential to Hayalet's existence, and has full control over Billy's life. The battle between the two men is inevitable.





	Hayalet

Prologue: Carnac

 

Cleo never gets tired of watching the little ones. Listening to the pitter-patter of their feet and their chirping voices. She can tell them apart. In Carnac's silence the little ones have become her family.

A year on Earth is but a blink of an eye in the isolated module Cleo shares with her research objects. Carnac floats free in it's large container, pulled behind Hayalet on the ships journey to the endless void. Cleo is well aware of the sacrifice she's making. She won't survive this trip. Hayalet's crew only has two other human members and they too know they will never see their destination with their own eyes. All they have are approximates, projections, telescope images. They will be long deceased when Hayalet finally arrives to the orbit of what scientists on Earth and Mars named Asa. Sanctuary. Home. New Earth.

Once there, Hayalet's android crew will send Carnac down on the surface. The little ones will carry out tasks of terraforming and planting seeds, preparing the planet for human life. It might take hundreds of years still, but the crew can wait and once the seeds start to yield fruit and Asa's atmosphere has reached the needed consistense of oxygen, the real landing can begin. Humans preserved in cryogenic stasis deep in Hayalet's belly are slowly thawed and brought down on the surface. They will adjust to the new world in hibernation, and one day, they will awaken. Long after the little ones and those who made reaching this new paradise possible have turned to dust.

–

She has not used her private quarters for months and prefers a free floating hammock in the observation room. When she awakens in the middle of the night, the mimes already fill her view. Their dome is lit, their little swellings buzzing with life. Ramoc and his wife have come outside carrying spare building materials.

Cleo frees herself from the hammock and floats over to the screens. Her sleek fingers quickly adjust the dials. Ramoc's house, the incubation chamber. Oh yes! The pale skin of the egg is stretching from movement inside. Ramoc's firstborn. Just about to be born. Cleo will not move until she sees those little arms and feet push through the shell. The miracle of life. A mime is born every few days but this one is special for Cleo. Ramoc's son or daughter. They'll know after a few months. The offspring is genderless and still developing during their ”baby age”. They will be kept in the incubation chambers and fed nutritional liquid. In two months their bones have developed enough for them to start to crawl. They will be moved to nurseries. Their fingers and toes will part and the skin between dry and fall off. Their bodies will become more like a human and less like a soft white bean. On the fourth month the offspring usually starts to show gender-typical signs. The females grown tall and lean, the males build stronger bones and muscles that able them to carry heavy loads.

There's a commotion outside of Ramoc's house. Neighbors have gathered. They bring gifts – mostly food. Cleo feels a sting of disappointment. She has tried her best to reinforce the ideal of beauty and decorative items. Ramoc's wife Una seems to have adapted some of it but the progress is slow. She does prefer beautiful items for her home, even items with no practical use on few occasions, but similar practice in the mime community is just an illusion created by the strong need to copy. Ramoc and Una are a couple their neighbors look up to. Other mime's have so far copied their house, their physical appearance and their behavior. Males want to be like Ramoc, the caveman. Females comb their hair and leave it open to resemble Una. But in all the copying there's no emotion and it's clear that not all mimes have the same brain capacity. The majority will stay dumb, no matter what Cleo does. Real intelligence is so hard to replicate when there's so little to go around with. Mimes' brains are tiny.

It's a very simple society – more bird than human – and sometimes this makes Cleo overly frustrated. She might pull herself back and avoid looking at the dome for a while. She'll open the hatch to the cupola and spend a few hours floating in it, watching the stars and listening to Carnac's low murmur. The cupola is positioned in a way that she can see Hayalet. The windows are too far and they are shielded, but she'll know she's not alone.

Lately though, seeing Hayalet has become awkward. In the beginning of this journey she used to sleep in the cupola. Now, she'd rather float into Carnac's laboratory and continue her work. The DNA tanks are nowhere near expleting and those eggs won't fertilize themselves. Without her there would be no offspring in the mime city and no more little ones, and she only has maybe 20 or 30 more years to complete her research. And then there's this new project she has been working on... It's not authorized but how could it? They left the radius of Martian communications years and years ago. Cleo is not sure how much time has passed. Her internal clock has adjusted to the mimes' and every time she takes a look at Carnac's chronometer she's sure it's broken. She doesn't feel her body age. It's impossible time could run that fast.

Before being sealed into Carnac she was already using her own genes to tinker with the mimes. She worked closely together with the father of the project, Marcel Acady. Professor, genius, colleague, beloved. Only few weeks before the departure his suit was damaged during a space walk. Cleo was inside Carnac, the module not yet sealed into it's container. ”Take care of our children”, were his last words, that shining star that flew by. The little ones, the mimes. She was born on Mars. Without the ability to conceive or birth children of her own, Cleo took his last words to her heart.

After the departure she used Marcel's genes in her work. She wanted the mimes to know their Creator. She made them a sculpture. A god.

Marcel was a painter, one of those humans who take fleeting emotions and recreate them with oil on canvas. Such a futile work. Paintings fade. Paintings burn. Still, he encouraged Cleo to find a form of art that suited her. To take a break from her work. Her art would travel onboard of Carnac and once find appreciation among the inhabitants of Asa. Now, her best work is going to inspire the mimes, and after them, generations of people on New Earth. Marcel can't see it with his own eyes but sometimes, to Cleo, it seems as if there's a blink of intelligence behind the black glass orbs. Maybe he can see it after all. And maybe he's proud too, floating there in his cryo pod, forever frozen in time, with his new, painstakingly crafted body of wires and rocks and crystals from Earth. Cleo has filled every missing piece of his flesh, repaired every torn muscle, even replaced bones. Marcel's face is sculpted out of a single plate of silver. Behind the mesh of the art, his organs and brain are perfectly preserved. Maybe one day the people on New Earth will have the technology to wake him up. The thought makes Cleo's heart beat faster. She won't see that happen but she's not sad. She knew how her story would end and she's done her very best to be remembered forever.

In awe, Cleo watches Ramoc's child twist inside the egg. Ramoc was her first true success. He expressed an above average intelligence already as a child. His wife Una came from another DNA strain with similar promise. They were born only minutes apart and spent their first months in the same nursery. After returning to their homes it was clear they far exceeded the skills of their family members. The mimes are not developed enough to create schools or careers. For that the dome has a programming facility. Brainwashing, really, but Cleo frowns upon using the word. Mimes are too human. It's true their brain capacity is very limited and that they were created for a single task. In Carnac though, in their own society, they have rights. One of the earliest experiments showed that without the programming they will not be able to show their true potential. The mimes need this type of education. They are very similar to human children indeed.

Cleo turns her gaze to Ramoc and Una. Before the embryo was planted into their incubator both of them would have left for their work or education already. But since the egg is here it's both their job to care for it. Make preparations for the youngling. A light in the control panel tells Cleo that everyone has arrived at their designated working places. The city under the dome calms down.

She checks on the video feed coming from the programming hives. Everyone is attentive. There's a little movement as those reaching a higher level shuffle between the different rooms. A few remarkable fast learners can ”level up” several times a day. She makes notes while watching. Some DNA strains do better than the others. The pattern she's discovered is not to her liking. She'd love to give the weaker ones a chance too. Those twins for example, Leva and Liberty as she calls them. Twins are rare among the mimes and creating an egg with two embryos is a huge risk. They did seem stable enough though. Cleo sighs. She has a visual on Liberty. The young female with long pale hair. Such beauty. Such impossible stupidity. Leva wasn't a fast learner but Liberty never made it past 3rd class. Liberty is now preparing food for the hive students and workers. Leva made it to a lower grade technician before suffering a stroke. She works under supervision in one of the crafting hives. They never learned to recognise each other as family members and Cleo gave up with twins after that.

The vials marked with blue tape are right in front of her, reminding of another failure. This is why she is no longer talking with Hayalet's crew. She would like to. She misses her chats with Saya, the android botanist and bio-engineer. They were friends long before being chosen for Hayalet's mission. Saya was created in the same medical facility Cleo was born and raised. They studied together, laughed together, learned how to be human. Neither of them could ever visit Earth but they wanted to. For Hayalet's mission they both went through a painful transformation. Saya's body was fitted with parts to deal with Hayalet's artificial gravity, Cleo had to adjust for living in complete weightlessness. They could still see each other and on board of Hayalet they could still talk to each other.

And then Cleo did something as stupid as request DNA samples from the other human crew – for experimental purposes. She met the leading engineer around the same time than professor Acady. As far as she knows, Cole Marshall had an important role back on Earth. The man is a genius in designing and maintaining life support modules for interplanetary space ships. An unbearable miscreant with such a terrible personality Cleo can only wonder how it's possible for a just decision-maker like Sage to allow this...thing on his ship. Cole Marshall is a caveman in that word's worst possible meaning. Not through his looks, although he does have this expression on his face that screams ”get out of my way, you're useless”. The man causes fear in everyone he meets. When he first inspected the hydroponics Saya accidentally dropped a whole cabbage at his feet. The engineer picked it up, saying ”what is this disgusting thing? Don't tell me you're feeding me these!” and slammed the vegetable against the wall so hard it broke in thousand pieces.

Despite the situation Cleo can't help but chuckle. Her and Saya have called the man Coleslaw ever since. Last time they talked it sounded that Coleslaw didn't spend that much time around the others anymore. Saya felt sorry for his apprentice, said she tried to get the boy to eat more. So thin and pale that he is.

Cleo is brought back to the vials. She has a worried look on her face. She knows she shouldn't have done it. It's heartwrenching but she may have to terminate these subjects. Coleslaw's genes produced strong mimes. Quick to grow, fast to learn, all stats above average, yet they would not level up beyond 22nd class. The male ones were attractive to female mimes but too distracted to get past first few dates. The female ones showed no interest in mating and if put together with a possible partner they'd simply walk away. Cleo has pulled all of them out of the crafting hives. They became restless and started expressing aggressive behavior towards their co-workers. Because their above average height the male ones would cause fear in the rest of the population. Cleo is even more careful after witnessing a female Coleslaw attack a regular male. They will have to go. That man is a hazard.

Then there are those few mimes she was able to craft from the apprentice technician's genes. She only knows his first name, Billy. They were never properly introduced. A fellow genius, physically not suitable for space missions but he volunteered. And Coleslaw vouched for him. Billy is something like those old world magicians – when he's around technology. No social skills whatsoever, poor health, workaholic. Also seemed to suffer from moderate to high anxiety. It's his bright mind that caught Cleo's eye. A bright mind that is reflected in the handful of mimes kept in a separated facility.

But just the mind. Their brains are enourmous compared to the regular mimes. Their bodies are weak. They never developed a proper gender and their bones are still soft and fragile. Most of the batch died. They are apathetic and show no interest in anything but learning. And oh do they learn. All of them have passed level 105 and produce miracles in the small crafting space Cleo built for them. They focus on their work and often collapse of exhaustion. There's one that seems kind of female and is the strongest in the bunch. She creates art similar to Una in her free time.

Looking at them Cleo realizes once again how much work is yet to be done. She could try introducing the stronger Billys to the regular community. At least that one female. She did contemplate on splicing their genes with the Coleslaws. Just to see how the cells would behave, maybe produce one or two samples. A weak moment of a frustrated mind, she calls it. Replicating her fellow crew was already bad, further experiments would never be forgiven. She feels so small and useless. So far away from everyone. So alone.

It's dark inside of Carnac. The mime city has woken up to a new day, the dome shines and lights up The Creator, it's eyes motionless voids. Little hands push against the synthetic skin of an egg.

 


End file.
